Jerry of the Islands eBook

On the way, he had raided the little islet of Ugi,
sacked the store, and taken the head of the solitary
trader, a gentle-souled half-caste from Norfolk Island
who traced back directly to a Pitcairn ancestry straight
from the loins of McCoy of the Bounty. Arrived
safely at Malaita, he and his fellows, no longer having
any use for the two San Cristobal boys, had taken
their heads and eaten their bodies.

“You blessed Sing Song Silly,” Villa,
murmured in Jerry’s ears. “If it
hadn’t been for you—­”

“Your head and mine would even now be galumping
through the bush as Makawao hit the high places for
home,” Harley concluded for her. “My
word, some fella dog that, any amount,” he added
lightly. “And I gave him merry Ned just
the other day for nigger-chasing, and he knew his
business better than I did all the time.”

“If anybody tries to claim him—­”
Villa threatened.

Harley confirmed her muttered sentiment with a nod.

“Any way,” he said, with a smile, “there
would have been one consolation if your head had gone
up into the bush.”

“Consolation!” she cried, throaty with
indignation.

“Why, yes; because in that case my head would
have gone along.”

“You dear and blessed Husband-Man,” she
murmured, a quick cloudiness of moisture in her eyes,
as with her eyes she embraced him, her arms still
around Jerry, who, sensing the ecstasy of the moment,
kissed her fragrant cheek with his ribbon-tongue of
love.

CHAPTER XXIV

When the Ariel cleared from Malu, on the north-west
coast of Malaita, Malaita sank down beneath the sea-rim
astern and, so far as Jerry’s life was concerned,
remained sunk for ever—­another vanished
world, that, in his consciousness, partook of the
ultimate nothingness that had befallen Skipper.
For all Jerry might have known, though he pondered
it not, Malaita was a universe, beheaded and resting
on the knees of some brooding lesser god, himself
vastly mightier than Bashti whose knees bore the brooding
weight of Skipper’s sun-dried, smoke-cured head,
this lesser god vexed and questing, feeling and guessing
at the dual twin-mysteries of time and space and of
motion and matter, above, beneath, around, and beyond
him.

Only, in Jerry’s case, there was no pondering
of the problem, no awareness of the existence of such
mysteries. He merely accepted Malaita as another
world that had ceased to be. He remembered it
as he remembered dreams. Himself a live thing,
solid and substantial, possessed of weight and dimension,
a reality incontrovertible, he moved through the space
and place of being, concrete, hard, quick, convincing,
an absoluteness of something surrounded by the shades
and shadows of the fluxing phantasmagoria of nothing.